Animated cartoons through the mirroring technique to teach stress pronunciation.

Abstract

This research project focused on analysing how by implementing animated cartoons in an EFL class with tenth graders at the public high school Robert Francis Kennedy, located in Bogota, through a mirroring technique, could help them to enhance their word and sentences stress performance. This idea arose from the lack of stress pronunciation skills noticed in these students, as they were not considering these pronunciation aspects when they were asked to express themselves communicatively in English, reason why their speech sounded not only unnatural, but at the same time, it was at certain point quite difficult to understand what they wanted to say. Hence, in order to try to help them to enhance their stress pronunciation performance and by doing so, their communicative skills; it came up the idea of using animated cartoons, as not only they could be appealing to the learners, but additionally, as in many of them; the characters tend to exaggerate their speech, making more evident stress pronunciation patterns. And combined them with the mirroring technique, so that, the learners could put these stress patterns into practice. In regards to the methodology, this research adopted a qualitative approach, and used as main sources to gather data: a pre and post-test, audio recordings, students‟ artifacts and field notes. Once analysed the data, it was found that after being exposed to the animated cartoons, most of the students were more aware of stress pronunciation patterns; reason why when conveying an idea, their speech sounded more natural and understandable. At the same time, it was evident that most of the students found the animated cartoons appealing, but in order for them to be applied as didactic material in EFL, they should be contextualised and accompanied by explicit input of the topic or skill to be practised.